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SoftMaker Office 2012 will be released this year. Right now, we are preparing the public beta test which will soon be announced.

To whet your appetite, we will be talking about the new features and improvements in SoftMaker Office 2012 in the coming weeks here at the SoftMaker Blog. Be sure to come back regularly to find out about the latest news.

Letâ€™s start with PlanMaker 2012. It closes the last remaining compatibility gaps with Microsoft Excel:

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Whatâ€™s new in PlanMaker 2012?

XLSX import now also allows seamless access to XLSX files created in Microsoft Excel 2010.

PlanMaker 2012 can now also save in XLSX format, which means that Excel 2007 and 2010 can access your PlanMaker calculations without taking the detour to XLS format.

User-defined number formats are now fully Excel-compatible. Even the most complicated user-defined formats will now be imported and exported correctly.

Finally, we added the format Format/Cell/Text that lets you format cells as text even if you enter numeric values.

PlanMaker 2012 supports charts not only on worksheets but also on separate chart sheets.

But better compatibility was not the only thing we worked on. We also added new features, such as data consolidation, a command to split cell contents to multiple columns, new chart types, and commands for automatically removing empty rows and duplicate values.

And Excel diehards will gladly find that the commands Copy down and Copy from left are now also supported by PlanMaker.

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All customers who purchase SoftMaker Office 2010 for Windows at list price after August 15, 2011 will receive a free upgrade (delivered by download) to SoftMaker Office 2012 for Windows when it is released.

Itâ€™s not only the big things that make a new version easier to use. Many small things taken together can bring a significant step forward in ease of use, too. And SoftMaker Office 2012 adds many small improvements. So, let the parade beginâ€¦: (read more at http://softmaker.com/english/blog/?p=340 )

Softmaker Office 2012 will be offered in two versions, Standard and Professional, as Softmaker is going to launch an email client. I don't know how this can be named version 3, I never heard of 1 or 2. And I don't know what other differences there may be, because I don't do betas any more, if I am not sure I can afford to also purchase a license ;-).

^FYI - the very capable 2008 edition is still available for free with no restrictions on either personal or business use. If you're in the market for a very nice spreadsheet and wordprocessor - and don't need the new features in the latest edition (and many won't) there's no need to wait at all.

I probably could give it a run, too. Latest version I tried was 2008, notably faster and smoother than OpenOffice. But I sometimes need to handle Office XML files, so I'm not sure if it is worth it. Let's see...

How are its OpenDocument filters?

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I bet when Cheetahs race and one of them cheats, the other one goes "Man, you're such a Cheetah!" and they laugh & eat a zebra or whatever.- @VeryGrumpyCat